Yuè
noun #51,218

Meanings

  1. 1 abbreviation for Guangdong province (广东)
  2. 2 Cantonese (language and culture)

Examples

HSK 2
Tā shì Yuè rén, huì shuō yī kǒu liúlì de Yuèyǔ.
He's Cantonese, and speaks fluent Cantonese.
HSK 7-9
Zhè liàng chē guà de shì Yuè A páizhào.
This car has a Guangzhou (Yue A) license plate.

Tips

culture
is the official one-character abbreviation for Guangdong - it appears on every Guangdong license plate (A is Guangzhou, B is Shenzhen, etc.). It also forms the names of Cantonese culture: 粤语 (Cantonese language), 粤菜 (Cantonese cuisine), 粤剧 (Cantonese opera).
history
originally referred to the ancient Baiyue (百越) peoples south of the Yangtze. Over time the region split into multiple provincial abbreviations, with narrowing to mean Guangdong specifically (Guangxi uses ).

Components

radical
rice; grain
Top indexes under the rice radical, with visible inside an enclosing frame topped by a short cap. The frame and cap are graphic residue of traditional , historically fused into a unit too tight to split - the 10 strokes absorb both frame and inner . names Guangdong and Cantonese culture by convention, not by grain-meaning.
phonetic
kǎo
exhale; obstructed breath
Bottom , an archaic graph picturing breath rising and bending around an obstruction. Supplies the phonetic frame in the traditional (yuè), preserved unchanged in the simplification. Same base appears as the phonetic skeleton in , , and other characters in the kǎo / qiǎo sound family - here drifting to yuè through long historical sound change.

Stroke Order

Yuè